A manager-level software engineer of Indian origin in the US has been charged with trading on confidential information he received while creating a website for consumers impacted by a data breach. Sudhakar Reddy Bonthu, 44, is a citizen of India and a permanent resident of the US state of Georgia.
The Securities and Exchange Commission said Bonthu committed securities fraud by engaging in illegal insider trading in the securities of information solutions and human resources company Equifax.
Bonthu was an Equifax employee from September 2003 until March this year.
The SEC charged him with insider trading in advance of the company’s September 2017 announcement of a massive data breach that exposed Social Security numbers and other personal information of approximately 148 million US customers.
This is the second case the SEC has filed arising from the Equifax data breach.
In March, SEC had charged the former CIO of a US business unit of Equifax, Jun Ying, with insider trading.